Slack hooks up with Microsoft Teams and Zoom VoIP calls

Maybe the world needs the Pidgin of voice and video right now?

Slack has added more integrations with Microsoft Teams and Zoom calls.

Integrating with Teams is true to form for Slack because despite the upstart offering native voice and video chats it’s already integrated with plenty of other video calling tools. And does so happily while suggesting it is the future of work and all rivals are off the pace.

On the other hand, Microsoft often measures Teams’ adoption rate against Slack’s user numbers. And – surprise! – the numbers Microsoft puts up always make it look like Slack is a straggler.

Slack doesn’t see things that way. Its page for the new Teams plugin talks up the convenience of its new offer. “Gone are the days of fumbling for meeting links—join Teams meetings directly from calendar reminders in Slack, using the Outlook or Google Calendar apps,” interested parties are told.

The Slack Zoom app was also updated to gain VoIP capabilities, so you can now dial out using Zoom Phone.

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With video and conferencing tools becoming the new normal, many of us will spend our days jumping between a few recently-installed pieces of software. By integrating with many such tools, Slack could become very handy indeed. Perhaps even as handy as Pidgin, the widely-used application that allowed users to log on to multiple chat services at once.

And for what it’s worth, a little light web searching will quickly yield links for Slack-to-Pidgin integration tools. ®